In 2010, operations became an even more central part of my life. As I write this blog post (in early January, 2011), we have been running on Amazon AWS — and EC2 in particular — for over a year.

Previously we had used a service called RightScale but in Q3 of 2010, we moved on/away from RightScale and started using chef and a service called Scalarium.

Because Opscode's chef became such a big part of my work life, I gave a talk about chef, and chef-solo in particular, at last December's PHP Usergroup meeting in Berlin. My talk contains experience made and insights into the whole thing and demo'd a couple chef basics — enough to get started.

Btw, the slides are using CSSS, a CSS-based slideshow system. I tried it for the first time and found working on my slides to be refreshingly simple compared to the things I had tried before. It's a pretty interesting and project.